Fait Accompli
by Dream Writer 4 Life
Summary: “Sometimes an unfinished job is the most effective.” 2nd place in SD-1 May ‘06 Challenge. A Dream Writer Experience.


**Title:** Fait Accompli  
**Author:** Dream Writer 4 Life  
**Rating:** PG-13 for language and character death  
**Genre:** Angst with a touch of romance and mystery  
**Archived:** SD-1, here, and my site. Anywhere else, just ask and you shall receive!  
**Spoilers/Timeline:** Post-"After Thirty Years" **(this is really important!)** with a reference to Project: Helix.  
**Disclaimer:** I own nothing. Period. End of story. Wait, no it's not! Keep reading!  
**Summary:** "Sometimes an unfinished job is the most effective." 2nd in SD-1 May '06 Challenge. A Dream Writer Experience.  
**Suggested Soundtrack:** "Breathe No More" and "Forgive Me" by Evanescence, "Inferno" off the S2 Alias soundtrack, and "Shed Some Light" and "Simple Man" by Shinedown. Your basic angst-tastic songs.  
**Author's Note:** This has two inspirations: laras_dice's archive and finals. This fic is a bit confusing at first, but stick with it; I promise I make sense after a little bit. (PS: A second read-through might clarify a few things.) Enjoy!

Fait Accompli

He has not felt so carefree in a long while, not since . . . Not since the Water took over his life, burning a hole in his heart and sucking out his soul. Flames lick him from within as without, and he basks in the feeling of warmth and happiness finally attained. Pain bubbles to the surface and leaks from his body.

It feels just wonderful.

Reality vaporizes in vertical waves before his outstretched legs as plaster chunks fall from the ceiling, crumbling to ash on the floor his hand his nose. He leans back against the drywall, feeling the throbbing pulse of the fire increase as his own begins to slow. The scenes in his mind finally begin to recede, scenes of a midsummer's sky at noon and mud and a betraying love so consummate it burns much more than fire it burns like Water—

He wants no one to remember his story. This is why he burns: to forget the story and prevent other chapters. He makes his own end.

Matchbook slips from his fingertips. Corners of his lips tilt upward. Fire finally trumps water.

_Fait accompli_.

***

_**Sky**_

Agent Michael Vaughn wakes up and has no idea where Agent Michael Vaughn is. Silty pavement eludes his heels and blackens his hands as he tries to raise himself from beyond the horizontal. The world spins so fast that a spiraling gyre akin to that one poem appears in the pinkish night sky above him, and he feels his brain whipping around in his skull like clothes in a washing machine, his stomach tugged along with it, a wake rider behind a speedboat. Veins pulse and throb just beneath the skin, thinner and more viscous that before.

Drugs.

He can feel their drugs.

Whoever 'they' may be.

He's getting too old for this.

Finally righting himself, his eyes begin to shake off the cobwebs and take in his surroundings. A long brick wall. In an alley. _Very _descriptive. He has no idea what he looks like and does not desire to cause a commotion, and so he gravitates towards the left, darker end of the alley. Running his hands along the slick brick, he guides himself to the head of the alley and emerges into the neon bright.

He thinks he should have stayed in the alley.

Even though it is obviously past the middle of the night, the street bustles with people on foot, in old Japanese cars, on scooters and mopeds. Humanity threatens to overtake him, but his drug-lagged mind fights to stay above the fray. The buildings shoot up like Jack's beanstalk around him, the tops wavering like a child's tower of blocks. Shouts around him reach his ears but jumble on the way to his brain, arriving in a soggy-paper, convoluted mess that he simply does not understand.

He is no expert, but he likes to think that he can recognize the English language when he sees it. The symbols on those signs . . . ? Definitely not English. Squinting into the neon glow, his vision sharpens just enough so the squiggles become lines: Russian. He heaves an internal sigh. Chinese, he knows. Japanese, he knows. Korean, he's passable. But Russian he never took the time to learn. Peering up at a sign across the street, eyes narrowed to slits, he realizes somewhere near the back of his mind that he must look like a crazy person, but the rest of him _really_ wants to figure out that sign. As if on a breeze, a single name seems to float directly into his heart:

"_St. Petersburg."_

Spinning around to see who his guardian angel is, he merely sees the back of a woman with long brown hair melding quickly into the crowd.

* * *

He calls the CIA. They extract him, bring him home. Agent Eric Weiss picks him up at the airport with a cup of coffee and a blank face. When Vaughn can actually carry on a coherent conversation during the drive, Weiss pulls over at a greasy spoon and stops the car.

"What the hell is wrong with you, Vaughn?"

He says he has no idea what the normally jolly man beside him is saying.

A blank stare. His cheeks look less robust than usual. "You really have nothing to say to me?"

Headshake.

"_To anyone?"_

Wide-eyed headshake.

And now Weiss is shoving a gun at Vaughn's face. "Who the fuck are you?"

Vaughn's eyes widen even farther as he raises his hands and curses a question.

Jaw staunchly set, Weiss chokes up on the gun like a baseball player at the plate with tears in his eyes. "You randomly show up in an alley in St. Petersburg talking like your entire world _hasn't_ fallen apart, without a scratch anywhere, after three months. Three Goddamn motherfucking months. _Who the fuck are you?"_

He assures his frantic friend that he is no double, tone somewhere between calm and really confused.

Narrowed eyes, but the gun's barrel becomes less face-oriented. "What did you take care of when I was in the hospital?"

Those stupid fish, he responds matter-of-factly, but they died anyway. Someone had put beta food in the bag instead of goldfish flakes.

Weiss's gun drops to his lap, then the floor, and his entire hulk of a body begins to shake. "God, I'm glad it's you. I don't think I could take anything else right now." He looks like he wants to hug Vaughn, and for a moment, an awkward stench hangs in the car between them. The sensation seeps out through the car vents as Weiss holsters the weapon, still peering carefully at his passenger. "You're _sure_ you don't have anything to say to me?"

Vaughn shrugs and shakes head helplessly.

Weiss pulls back onto the road, but Vaughn can see the tears in his eyes.

* * *

He quits the CIA over the phone. The only job he has ever really known, and he walks away without really knowing why he feels this guttural adverse reaction to the Agency and the entire U.S. government. They return to Weiss's house to allow Vaughn a bit of rest before the obligatory invasive debrief, but he refuses to budge from the couch. Weiss paces in the kitchen, cell phone glued to his ear while tremors shake his vocal pattern. Vaughn, on the other hand, nestles into the overstuffed leather couch with his feet hanging off the end, his own cell phone cradled against his shoulder. He informs Mr. Devlin's secretary and then Mr. Devlin himself that, no, he will not be coming in for a two-day debrief; no, he will not be coming in to work tomorrow; and no, he is not insane.

He has the most trouble refuting the last one.

Shoving his cell phone into the depths of the couch, and feeling something crunch in the process, he passes an openly sobbing Weiss leaning against the refrigerator on his way out of the building.

Jobless for the first time since high school, he walks the streets of Los Angeles as if a weight has been lifted from his chest, one that cinched his heart like a really good pair of shoelaces. He wanders aimlessly, letting his feet carry him wherever they please. Apparently, they would like to visit a flower shop, because he stops in front of the window and stares, watching the workers inside scuttle in fast forward. His mind reels at the veritable rainbow of ruffles just on the other side of the glass.

A woman stops on the sidewalk beside him. A woman, normal in every way down to her brown eyes and brown hair and Starbucks coffee cup, who casually tucks a lock of hair behind her ear—

* * *

_A woman. Hair the color of a midsummer's sky at noon. That's all that stood out to me among the black leather and mesh and yellow glowsticks. Music rattled my ribs as I watched this woman slide around and in between the other bodies spinning like turbines. When she first looked at me in that outfit, my absurd leather coat felt entirely too hot. Now the sweat on the small of her back winked at me, and all I wanted to do was stop our progress toward the bathrooms and show these twentysomethings a thing or two about suggestive hip movements, but no: the gun resting snuggly in a coat pocket reminded me of the job at hand._

_Suddenly this __guy__ emerged from the crowd and grabbed her around the waist, spinning her into a fluid embrace. Something snapped within me, and I lashed out almost instantaneously, butting the heel of my palm into the shoulder joint just hard enough to get him to back off but not dislocate the damn thing. She slipped out of his arms and grabbed onto mine, turning her face away from me, trying to hide the amused giggle-grin spreading across her blood-red lips._

_But she peered back over her shoulder and caught her tongue coyly between her teeth — somehow maintaining her touch of innocence in a __sex club__ — reaching across with her free hand to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear—_

***

_**Water**_

The main feature of his house is dust, and it smells like a dog died in there at some point. The horizontal blinds clack as they zoom to the top, flooding light onto the hardwood floor, stirring up motes to dance on the sunbeams. His eyes adjust slowly, and the room's colors sift from the woodwork. He takes comfort in the familiarity of the organization: a dining room table with four chairs (just enough for Weiss and their mothers), the big-screen TV, couch exactly a body's length away so that he can lay on the floor and the TV would take up his entire field of vision. His heart finally attempts normal rhythm again.

The snapshot memory of That Woman jumpstarted his heart. It skipped a beat skipped the state skipped the country. It had not ceased to bounce around in his chest until he opened those blinds and allowed in the flood of light. He suddenly feels the itch to move, so he awkwardly lurches away from the window and down the hall towards his bedroom.

Ever since that memory, he has begun to feel. Ever since that memory, a tingle sloshes in the back of his mind, and that tingle made him run back to Weiss' house, grab the extra key, and stride briskly to his house. That tingle makes him jerk to a halt in the doorway to where he used to sleep and really think. But his brain decides to play keep-away with coherent thoughts, and before he can reclaim autonomy, the brain censors itself, tucking away those troublesome question marks in favor of numbness — cotton surrounding his head. But the tingle persists, as if his brain stem fell asleep.

In other words, it bugs him, but not so much that it makes him want to do something about it. Channel surfing; landing upon a Christian Children's Fund commercial; feeling a little heavy-hearted; and then changing the channel.

But as he glances around his nearly abandoned room, he looks for signs of a woman tucking hair behind her ear.

He heaves a sigh of mixed relief when he finds only pictures of Mario Lemmeux, Wayne Gretsky, and his mom.

The dust and smell finally begin to tickle his nose, and he throws open every window he passes on the way to his small stash of cleaning supplies. Snatching an entire roll of paper towels and a half-empty bottle of electric blue Windex, he does his best impression of that karate kid on the windows.

Minutes tick by as he massages each pane of glass, and even as he marvels at the illumination overflowing onto the floor, the neon blue liquid distracts him. It pulls him back to the memory, the flashes of sight, sound, and sweeping emotion that somehow somewhere sometime implanted into his head.

Why does this woman have such an effect on him? He does not even know who she is, and still her wacky hair and giggle-grin diffuse into his heart as food into a cell. He feels . . . Well, he does not understand what exactly he feels, but whatever it is, it begins to pull at the pit of his stomach, to eat at the cotton mill surrounding his head — but not enough so that he can come to any conclusions, and he gets frustrated because he can't find answers so the questions keep tumbling over one another and working themselves into a rolling boil that threatens to turn violent if he even _tries_ to think about it anymore—

Who is she?

Turning down the volume of the buzz in his brain, he quickly finishes with the Windex and tucks it away again. He collapses on the couch with a small huffing sigh, sending up even more dust motes. The rest can wait.

* * *

He sees no reason to venture out of his house in the near future; he is perfectly content to laze about and catch up on old movies and every sport ever, alone with his beer watching hockey on a big screen.

Weiss drops by after a few days to return a little something he found buried in the depths of over-stuffed leather hell. After digging remnants of Cheetos out of the crevices — he _knew_ it — Vaughn checks the missed call list. More than a few Weiss calls, and he expected that, but there's another number that appears under what must be a code name: _Bozo dad._

He calls the number, and a nice recorded lady rewards him with the information that the number no long exists.

Upon questioning Weiss, his friend becomes pales and looks almost like someone punched him in the gut with a nuclear weapon. He replies that "it's classified information, now, Mike" and leaves quickly, hopefully to throw up somewhere else.

He wonders if his friend accidentally ate the Stale Couch Cheetos.

* * *

Eventually even his neat freak gene completely peters out, and he leaves the vacuum where he stops it in the middle of the guest room. After wrestling the DVD player into accepting _The Bourne Identity_ (he likes pointing out the inaccuracies), he decides to make himself something to eat. Always ordering in with Weiss for the past week — and having no fresh food because of his (apparently) length absence — he has to really search for something edible, and he stumbles upon a stash of Ramen noodles most likely left over from his late-night, shallow-pocket college days. Mentally heaving a sigh, he turns on the faucet—

* * *

_Feeling of zero-gravity weightlessness coupled with lead lungs._

_I couldn't tell whether the throbbing in my ears resulted from panic or the water rushing around my head. After everything going terribly wrong, the woman with hair the color of a midsummer's sky at noon disappeared behind Unbreakable Glass and a wall of water. Emergency lights still glowed in the flooded hallway, casting a greenish-blue tint over everything. My lungs seared from the lack of oxygen, burned in fact, but how could they have been burning I was submerged in a bajillion gallons of Red Ball water and a fin and gills would've been __really__ helpful right then—_

_Shrugged off my monstrosity of a coat, a part of me rejoicing. Didn't have the time, air to watch it float down, but did anyway. Soon as it touched ground, began to flail and pound on every solid surface within reach, wishing wanting hoping __needing__ to find a way out — __any__ way out — not because __lungs were burning a hole in chest__ but because had no idea what they were doing to her. Saw her go down before the water finally separated us, and felt—_

_Stucco ceiling grated on palms as I ungracefully searched for crevices that could suggest trapdoors, loose material, oxygen. Traveling farther from the door, grabbed onto light fixtures and wandered into patch of darkness. As lungs made impressions in ribs, and heart wanted to burst because she's in trouble and couldn't overcome a stupid nuisance like drowning to rescue her, felt it:_

_Grate. Ceiling._

_Air!_

_No idea how, but metal ended up at bottom, and I ended up gripping the rim with my fingertips and gulping down air. I didn't care what purpose this ventilation/air conditioner/random escape route for wayward swimmers shaft served just as long as it got me out of that water and closer to her. Despite my screaming, quaking, shivering muscles, I pulled myself up to the horizontal bend._

_Wet clothing caught on the rivets and weighed down my limbs, and I wanted nothing more than to tear them, rip them off and hurl them back down into the burning water._

_I wanted to find her. I needed to find her, because who knew what the hell they were doing to her? I remembered the arousal I felt when I first saw her disguise; what was to stop The Man from feeling the same?_

_Right after I regained the use of my lungs, they shorted again. I didn't know how I could live with myself if—_

_Right left right right left right left._

_At the first grate I saw that did __not__ have sloshing blue water on the other side I rammed through, flopping down on a concrete floor that I would have kissed if there hadn't been a shiny pair of black combat boots in front of my nose._

_My temple met the pointy end of an elbow._

***

_**Mud**_

He tries to figure out a way to cleanse himself without the use of water. In the meantime, he stocks up on deodorant and cologne.

He avoids everywhere he can _possibly_ find water — sinks, bathtubs, TV — but he sees it everywhere. Of course, it's Shark Week on the Discovery Channel; the O.C. — _by_ the water; Dawson's _Creek. _. . . So he unplugs the TV along with the land line, and he now spends most of his time flipping through photo albums and old newspaper clippings. Anything that can prove she exists anywhere outside his memory.

Low on supplies, he ventures out of his house for the first time in weeks; he's tired of living off of dry Ramen noodles and the dregs of his liquor cabinet, and thinking about this mystery, frustrating as it is, distracts him from noticing that Los Angeles teems with water.

His questions have graduated from that of her identity to that of his relationship to her. He remembers the single thought that cascaded through his mind while in the midst of trying not to drown: he had to get to her to rescue her to whisk her away from all of this (whatever 'this' was) and make her smile and smile and laugh.

So why doesn't he have any pictures of her?

Or, better question, _any memory of her whatsoever?_

He pauses in the middle of the sidewalk as shoppers and suits on their lunch breaks bump and jostle him with their shoulders and choice expletives. Full of renewed hope, he digs his wallet from his back pocket and roots through every compartment.

Nothing.

But he does find a faded picture of Alice that should have been trashed eons ago.

That's the thing: he never fell for the crazy chicks, especially those with hair of unnatural color. Blondes are his type, ones who wear long wool coats and have simple names. Not ones who wear vinyl pants with a matching bra he can see through a mesh 'shirt.' And especially not those that wear dog collars.

So why can't he keep his mind off of her?

Why does his heart start skipping the country when he thinks of pouty lips, blue, and—

Water.

He slams to a halt again, teetering on a corner curb, balancing precariously over a puddle in the gutter. He cannot tear his eyes from it. In the shallow rainwater, he sees a white door with a window but it gets darker and farther away the longer he lingers and suddenly he cannot breathe or move but he feels oh god he feels he feels like his heart is going to burst in his chest before he reaches her and he pitches forward to grab for the metal door and—

A Good Samaritan pulls him back before the front of a taxi wipes off his face.

A few false but reassuring words later and he's back on his way to the local grocery store.

When he gets there and grabs his (blue) basket, he knows everyone's staring at him. He can just feel it. No, it's not paranoia! Obviously his jarring memories of late have marked him like a mutant or Harry Potter. He stalks quietly around the inner aisles, carefully avoiding bottled water or water balloons or Windex. Coming upon the check lanes, he realizes he only grabbed a refill on the Ramen and turns with a frustrated sigh back towards the foods that don't require water, oblivious the rumbling sky just outside the tinted windows.

Following a minor incident near the fresh produce — hebroke only his carton of eggs when the misters turned on and made him scream bloody murder — he returns to check out and manages a bit of small talk with the cashier. (He pleasantly notes that she's a natural brunette.) He pays for his purchases without a wrinkle but does not hear her weather warning because he is too busy giving the _'Caution: Wet Floor'_ sign a wide berth.

Immensely proud of his small foray back into the real world, he decides to reward himself by taking the scenic route through the park back to his house. Gusts of blustery wind bring real scents to his nose, and even his panicky heart begins to relax under the overcast sky. He finally believes he can think clearly about this mystery woman and so slows his pace in order to give him more mulling time.

She obviously meant something to him at some point in time. In fact, she is starting to grow on him now: he can imagine falling in love with those expressive eyes and giggle-grins. Just the feeling from the remembered smile . . . Were they lovers? If they were, then why didn't he have any pictures of her? He isn't the type to go all Voodoo, but he did like to keep mementos. If he and this other woman were together at some point, he would have kept something. But why else would they be in a sex club?

Perhaps they worked together at the CIA. But Weiss would have mentioned her by now. Right? Why else would they have been in Taipei? It would certainly explain the whole gun thing. And why he felt the need to go rescue—

Water.

On his nose.

Shit.

It's raining.

Fuck.

For a moment, sheer panic overcomes all of his senses, overloading all of them and rendering him completely paralyzed as the sky cracks open like one of the eggs he broke and dumps on him. Each minuscule drop of water singes and sizzles as it pelts bare skin but absolutely freezes him on the inside. All he can think: it's raining it's raining oh god it's raining and he has nowhere to hide nowhere to hide and he's drowning suffocating burning up again _Lord_ it burns and is she all right he has to get to her—

Completely forgetting any sense of decorum, he begins sprinting through the park in a direct line towards his house, bags of groceries still in his hands but now almost totally forgotten as they bounce and crash together in his wake. He cuts through a homemade baseball field but takes the course too fast, and as he speeds through what should be second base, he skids and suddenly finds himself flat on his back in a gigantic puddle of mud.

_Brown_ mud.

_

* * *

_

_Twin pools of brown like bald patches of ground after a summer storm. They jumped out at me when I regained consciousness. My body was thrashing against some sort of restraint tying me to a table, and I could feel blood milling around my hairline and pooling in my palms, and my head contracted and expanded in time with my heart but none of that mattered because she was touching my arms my chest my face—_

"_Hey! Hey-hey-hey, Vaughn! It's me. It's gonna be okay, but I need you to wake up and stop moving. Please. There's no water anywhere." I stopped moving as my vision cleared, and her entire face swam into view, pouty lips miles away from anything resembling a grin. I must have looked confused because she removed a hand from my chest and tugged the blue wig from her scalp, brown hair rushing in to take its place. "See? Just me."_

"_Are you all right?" I croaked, yearning to run my eyes (or, better yet, my hands) over her body to assure myself she was in one piece._

_A spark glimmered in her eye. "I'm not the one strapped to a table, so I think I'm one up on you." She didn't answer the question, but she also didn't allow time for an interjection. "I just broke out of a room down the hall. I got here as soon as possible."_

"_Where is 'here'? Where are we?" I tried to turn my head to either side, but my stomach bungee-jumped into my throat and would have exited my throat entirely if I hadn't locked my lips._

_She ran a hand across my forehead, soothing my nausea. "No idea. I __think__ we're still in Taipei, but I was out cold too." She paused — a mere flinch — but I knew something bad was coming. "I saw my mom. She's the one who's holding us here."_

_For a moment, the polished veneer fell away, and a trembling six-year-old child dealing with abandonment issues stood before me. My stomach lurched again for a different reason, and my hand instinctively sought hers, wrapping her shaking flesh with my own. Even though the entire rest of her body quaked, our connected gaze remained steady as she refamiliarized herself with her age._

_She squeezed my hand. "Okay, we need a plan."_

"_Oh, __now__ you listen to me." A Look. "Right. Well, getting me out of here would be a great first step."_

_Nodding, she sounded grateful to have direction. "Right. Okay. Good." She started working my straps. She was about to free one of my hands when the door slammed open, and four extremely armed guards charged in and surrounded us followed by an all-too-familiar woman._

"_My dear daughter." Her words spanned syrupy-sweet years, flowing as quickly as molasses down a horizontal surface. "Please don't make this any harder than it needs to be. Just stay put and the hand-off will go smoothly."_

_My brown furrowed. "Hand-off?"_

_The guards struggled to surround let alone sedate her, but they finally chained her hands and feet together in one mass and dragged her by the crooks of her elbows. Our eyes locked again as I silently reassured her that I would come for her. __'Tell them nothing, Vaughn. No matter what. Tell them nothing.' 'Okay. Nothing.'__ Then she turned her sharp tongue at her mother. "I'm being sent to my room, then? Do I not get dinner?"_

_The other woman ignored her and strode farther into the room in order for them to pass. Her gaze locked onto mine, and I felt the hatred well like bile in my gut until I wanted to spit; she merely cocked her head as she slowly refastened the wrist restraint. "That was . . . interesting."_

_I could only assume what she meant._

_She took measured strides back to the door but hesitated in the doorway, wrapping her slim hand around the doorframe. "You should not have come for her."_

_

* * *

_

_I didn't know what made me pass out again, but when I woke up, I was strapped to a chair, this time on the other side of a dented metal table from a man I'd only seen photographs._

"_Sloane."_

_A grotesque smile twisted his lips. "I'm glad to see my reputation precedes me, but I'm afraid I don't have that advantage, Agent Vaughn, is it? But I'm sure we'll have fun getting to know each other."_

***

_**Water**_

This woman starts to take over his life.

After Weiss finds him rocking against the dishwasher absolutely covered in mud and mumbling about hair and eyes and water, the agent calls the CIA and asks for a plan, causing Vaughn to jump up and run into the other room where he left the photo albums, smearing soil on their plastic-covered surfaces as he tears through them, looking for her. He refuses to accompany Weiss to the Ops Center, but does agree to daily visits to Weiss's house, an obvious ploy to get him out into the sane world again, but he complies anyway.

He wears a yellow plastic hooded poncho for his first visit, just in case, and calls in sick if there's even a hint of rain.

This woman starts to take over his life in a big way. He finds no clues at home, but en route to Weiss's house, he finds something. Actually, a lot of somethings. Almost every object, every person he sees sparks minuscule remembrances, small feelings of déjà-vu that spread the tickle in his brain stem throughout his entire body until he feels like he's a walking vibrating chair. He remembers snippets of memories — flashes, really, of a former time/place with her or about her or something that reminds him of her. She permeates every step he takes, every breath he breathes, every scene he sees. He wants to wrap himself in every vestige of her he can find.

He wonders if he felt this consumed when he remembered her. And why he stopped the remembering part in the first place.

As much as he does not want to believe it maybe . . . maybe he did it on purpose. Suppressed every remnant of her to protect himself from some profound pain on the other side. But he quickly decides it doesn't matter: he's intoxicated with only the small doses of her, so the closer he can get to the source, the quicker he can follow the spring to the ocean. . . .

He's definitely in love.

And she is worth the risk.

He finally feels the cotton mill around his brain distilling until only a ball exists to blot out the leaks as they spring up. Finally, he believes he's getting somewhere.

Those walks to and from Weiss's house actually become enjoyable; he looks forward to them on the days when it is safe to walk outside. Like that old hippo game, he gobbles up clues to her identity that she seems to have left purposely throughout the greater Los Angeles area only for him to find. People go from darting discrete glances of unease to blatant stares of anxiousness when he passes them on the street mumbling about blue, mud, and water.

One day he forgets to show up at Weiss's house at all; he spends the sunlit hours wandering downtown L.A. like a fish in a new pond. Reluctantly he makes his way back home at sunset only to find Weiss tearing everything apart. He doesn't even stop when Vaughn walks in.

"Weiss, what the hell are you doing?!"

"Looking for answers," he replies curtly, haphazardly throwing a couch cushion back into place. He peers up at his friend from under his eyebrows. "Will you give them freely?"

Vaughn reels as he tries to scramble away from thoughts of her. "Depends on what you want to know."

"Sit down." He turns a chair to face the window and folds his arms across his chest. "Ever since you came back, you're weird and distant and not anywhere near your real self. I mean, where did this water phobia come from! What's wrong with you?"

I'm remembering, he wants to scream I remember . . . ! Parts. Only parts. Can you fill me in on the rest? But something seals his lips so all that escapes from his throat is a confused jumble of consonants that sounds like a dying giraffe.

Weiss sighs and throws up his hands. "I give up, Vaughn! I'm not gonna do this anymore. When you're ready to talk about everything, come find me."

Vaughn doesn't move as his only friend in the world storms out of his house and down the driveway. Pausing with the car door halfway open, the two of them lock eyes through the window, and Vaughn feels absolutely paralyzed with emotion.

_

* * *

_

_All alone in an execution observation room. I was left chained to that chair practically day and night for God knows how long, left to stew in my own guilt and panic and fear juices, left to observe an endless parade of ghost executions._

_They never touched me. Chaffing from the cuffs was the worst injury I received, and I did that to myself. Which made me all the more worried._

_What the hell were they doing to her?_

_Sloane came to, chat to make sure I was doing all right there in my paradise of a holding cell. When I wouldn't respond, he just stared at me, and I had the eerie feeling that my thoughts rotated across my forehead like a stock ticker. He always smiled. "Don't worry, I'm taking good care of our little girl." His exit only issued in a new flood of anxiety._

_Finally after what seemed like daysweeksmonths, activity began in the execution room. People would bring in equipment from all sets of doors, the last being an empty tank about four feet deep. Oh God they're going to do this to me, I though. Waterboarding. I ran through escape plans for when transported me._

_But one morning (afternoon? Night?) they brought her in, now dressed in what could only be an overturned burlap sack with arm and head holes. She looked like she log-rolled down a hill after a storm; the back was slashed and streaked with blood. They threw her down onto her stomach into the tank and immediately attached weights to her hands and ankles. I could see her mouth moving but didn't hear anything: soundproof glass. I renewed my struggle to __get out of the damn chair._

"_She hasn't broken yet," a voice from behind me drawled. "In a way, it makes me proud to know that SD-6 torture-resisting methods work when put to the test. But you, Agent Vaughn . . ." Sloane stopped in front of the glass with his arms folded over his chest, just in my line of sight. "You'll break."_

_Down below, she thrashed and kicked out at the people attending her, managing to connect with someone before they tasered her back into quasi-submission._

_I jumped in my seat again, and he smiled. "You won't hurt her. You think of her like a daughter. You won't hurt her." Even to me, my voice sounded limp._

"_Okay." His tone told me otherwise. The guy who seemed to be in charge down there knelt by her head, continuing the inquisition. Her mouth moved but apparently did not supply the desired answer, and as he signaled to one of the others, the tank began to fill. I fought against my restraints as her hands slipped and slid over the slick surface of the glass tank, panic finally stretching her features._

"_Stop," I whispered, eyes transfixed on the rising water level._

"_It only stops when you start talking." His voice was by my ear, and I nearly leapt out of my skin. "What do you say? Is it time to cooperate, or do we still need __more water?"_

_The tank was about half full, and she supported herself on her elbows, still defiant behind the panic. Suddenly a new deluge hit, and she hurried to raise herself to her hands. Her neck craned in order to keep her mouth and nose above the water. I remembered being submerged in the Red Ball Water, and my lungs stopped working properly, hitching and quaking incessantly. It touched her chin. "All right. I'll talk. What do you want to know?"_

_I told him everything: about the CIA, her, and her father. Their involvement in keeping, almost every mission from going exactly according to plan. My eyes remained absolutely fixed on her, willing the water to evaporate._

_When I finished, Sloane nodded in satisfaction and backed away to stare down into the room one more time. "Thank you, Agent Vaughn. It truly has been a pleasure, but I'm afraid our acquaintance must come to an end." Talking into a wrist communicator, his voice turned icy and sharp like the edges of a broken mirror. "Kill her."_

_All systems jumpstarted. "What! But-but I told you everything! You said it would stop."_

"_Yes, I did. But I never said it wouldn't start again." He approached me from the side, the muscle beside his nose twitching in anger. "She is no longer an asset, and therefore must be disposed of. And you . . ." he trailed off, voice warming sickly. "Sometimes an unfinished job is the most effective. Every time you think of this, you'll wish I'd killed you. You shouldn't have come for her."_

_He slunk out of the room as the water began to rise again. Her futile attempts at escape sloshed water out of the tank, but more came to replace it. Soon, she was entirely submerged and fought against her watery grave, bubbles rising to the surface._

_Then the bubbles stopped._

_She was still, hair spread out in a brown halo around her head._

_No tears came to my eyes._

"_SYDNEY!"_

***

a midsummer's sky at noon  
blue

bald patches of ground after a summer storm  
brown

love  
'_Tell them nothing, Vaughn. No matter what. Tell them . . .'_

water  
'_Tell them . . .'_

Tell them it burns like water.

***

He has not felt so carefree in a long while, not since the water took over his life, burning a hole in his heart and sucking out his soul. Pain bubbles to the surface and leaks from his body.

It feels just wonderful.

Reality vaporizes in vertical waves before his outstretched legs as plaster falls in chunks from the ceiling. The scenes in his mind finally behind to recede, scenes of a midsummer's sky at noon and mud and a betraying love so profound it burns much more than fire it burns like water—

He wants no one to remember his story. This is why he burns: to forget the story and prevent other chapters. He makes his own end.

Matchbook slips from his fingertips. Corners of his lips tilt upward. Fire finally trumps water.

_Fait accompli_.

He finishes the job.

Salvation at last.

_**END**_

***

Hope you enjoyed! Constructive criticism is encouraged; feedback is adored.

:D Becky, the Dream Writer 4 Life


End file.
